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Understanding
9/11- Usage
- Public Domain Mark 1.0
Published in 1944.
Germans have made five wars in the last seventy-five years, besides four "near misses." If Germans had had their way, there would have been a war every eight years for the last three-quarters of a century. This sequence is due to their character and system. I hope that these talks may help to dispel the timorous fallacy, that men are not concerned by the systems of their neighbours.
On the Germans' own franker showing before 1914 "the political history of Germany, from the accession of Frederick in 1740 to the present hour, has admittedly no meaning unless it be regarded as a movement towards the establishment of a world-empire, with the war against England as the necessary preliminary."
The atrocities committed under this German regime, and in this German war, and the open return to literal slavery in Europe, are no accidental and ephemeral outcrop. It has been well said by a German social historian that "the rise of Nazism in Germany extends over three generations." Nazi methods are certainly deep-rooted in Germany.
In 1907 I was crossing the Black Sea in a German ship. It was spring, and the rigging was full of bright-coloured birds. I noticed one of them in particular, strongly marked, heavier-beaked. And every now and then it would spring upon one of the smaller, unsuspecting birds, and kill it. It was a shrike or butcher-bird; and it was steadily destroying all its fellows. Now I am a bird-lover, and I couldn't stand this. I only had a revolver handy, and it took me the whole day to get that butcher- bird. And while I was doing it, a thought flew across my mind, and never again left it. That butcher-bird on that German ship behaved exactly like Germany behaves.
Now, think for a moment of the butcher-bird's record. Bismarck's resort to forgery--to make sure of war in 1870--was thought clever in Germany, if a little original. Well, by hook and by crook--especially crook--the butcher-bird got three wars before. 1914, and each time the stakes and the butcher's bill mounted; they were higher in 1866 than in 1864, and higher in 1870 than in 1866. Each of these wars was carefully planned and provoked by the butcher-bird. Then, in 1905, it nearly got another war; but the French submitted to the humiliation of throwing overboard their Foreign Minister, Monsieur Delcasse, just as before Germany's Fifth War they recoiled again and again rather than give Germany any pretext for turning Europe into a blood-bath. There was another narrow squeak in 1911, but the butcher-bird landed its Fourth War right enough in 1914. This time the crescendo mounted formidably; stakes and butcher's bill went rocketing.
And what had Adolf Hitler to say about that? He says in Mein Kampf: "I sank down upon my knees and thanked heaven out of the fullness of my heart for the favour of being permitted to live in such a time." In his own exultation and sniffing of carnage, it never occurred to him in 1914 that four hundred million happinesses were to be lined up and knocked down. Hitler's mind, of course, is incapable of working on those lines. You may think it strange that anyone should thank heaven -- why heaven? -- for the chance of wholesale slaughter. But you will see from what I have just said that Hitler was one with the past. This was Der Tag--"The Day"--that had been toasted all over Germany; and those of us who had lived in Germany had long known it was being toasted and lived for. It is therefore not surprising that in 1939 Germany's Fifth War began. Hitler was so overjoyed at the Fourth War that he was determined to have a fifth all of his own, and he left no stone unturned to ensure and prepare for it.
A Nazi is congenitally incapable of peace. It is not his idea of life. There was never the least real chance of the Kaiser or Hitler not making war. A German War every fifteen years on an average. Butcher-birds are destructive animals. There was no drinking to, or preparation for, "The Day'' of 1914 in England or France, let alone in poor little Belgium. I have already said how far France went to avoid it; and England's "contemptibly small army''--as Germany described it--was not designed or ready for continental warfare. The characteristic of the butcher-bird is to pounce upon his neighbours when they are living peaceably beside him; and it is their characteristic never to suspect him till it is too late.
The butcher-bird had had, and won, three wars before any of his neighbours began to suspect what he was really after. It was world-domination. The first three wars were prelude and preparation. The Fourth War was a bid for the real thing. This lust of world-domination has been working in them for generations, and for two of them I have myself watched it at work. I have seen the idea of the German Empire corrupting German nature, as the German philosopher Nietzsche foresaw seventy years ago.
Well, it so happened that Germany's Fourth War failed, though it only just failed. From that moment the welkin rang with German grievances; and everyone was so anxious to forget the gratuitous destruction of the four hundred million happinesses, that they also forgot the cruelty with which Germany had conducted that war--indiscriminate sinkings, mass-deportations, cruelty in prison-camps--and the type of peace that she had imposed at Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest in the days when the aggressor seemed to be winning. And so everything must be blamed on the Treaty of Versailles; the whining bully must be picked up and dusted down, and put on his feet again. And soon the butcher-bird was back on his perch in the thornhedge, preparing for his next meal. This time it was destined to be a record one. And the strange thing was that his victims had contributed to put him there by all the means, including loans, in their charitable power. Of course they got nothing but abuse for that. I said just now that his fellow-birds always seem incapable of telling a butcher-bird when they see one; and it is uphill work pointing out its distinguishing marks, unmistakable though they are to any bird-lover.
Hitler has capitalized the German strain of ill-defined mysticism--a blind faith fed on phrases about Germany's mission, Germany's destiny, which thrives on blind obedience to blind doctrines.
Hitler said on the first day of this war that he would not wage it on women and children; yet that is exactly what he did from the start. But when did Hitler ever keep his word? Literally never once. And there is nothing new in Hitler. Frederick the Great was an adept in perfidy. And what, in 1914, did Bethmann-Hollweg call a solemn treaty with Prussia's signature on it? "A scrap of paper." He could have bitten his tongue out the moment he had said it, for in four words he had given the whole German show away. That is what most German leaders really think of treaties. There is a definite continuity in their outlook. Bismarck announced that he was satisfied after 1871; and Ribbentrop and Hitler kept saying they were satisfied with every fresh acquisition, especially after the annexation of the Sudetenland. Of course they didn't mean it, as everyone can now plainly see.
Nazi Germany has taught a tortured world that it is easier to go backwards towards barbarism than it is to go forward to a higher civilization; and that, if we were to fail in standing upto her, the clock would go back by a thousand years and for a thousand years.
Nazism is a fundamental fraud. It is a pluto-bureaucracy; every Nazi creates a job for his pal, and the vast corrupt gang enjoys a life very different from the hardships of the ordinary German. There is hardly a single professional Nazi with a clean pair of hands. The only equipment needed in Nazi politics is a pair of sewer-boots. What do the people get in return? Efficiency. Efficiency for what? For the destruction of Four Hundred Million Happinesses.
Yes, in very truth we are fighting against evil things--evils which have possessed the German people for weary generations.
At all costs the world must never again be dragged by Germany into a war--merely because it fails to understand how Germany has behaved in the past and how it will behave again in the future, unless the German people undergo a deep, spiritual regeneration. There can be a new Germany, but it must be a quite new Germany.
But you will build nothing so long as this Germany endures to destroy.
Germans have made five wars in the last seventy-five years, besides four "near misses." If Germans had had their way, there would have been a war every eight years for the last three-quarters of a century. This sequence is due to their character and system. I hope that these talks may help to dispel the timorous fallacy, that men are not concerned by the systems of their neighbours.
On the Germans' own franker showing before 1914 "the political history of Germany, from the accession of Frederick in 1740 to the present hour, has admittedly no meaning unless it be regarded as a movement towards the establishment of a world-empire, with the war against England as the necessary preliminary."
The atrocities committed under this German regime, and in this German war, and the open return to literal slavery in Europe, are no accidental and ephemeral outcrop. It has been well said by a German social historian that "the rise of Nazism in Germany extends over three generations." Nazi methods are certainly deep-rooted in Germany.
In 1907 I was crossing the Black Sea in a German ship. It was spring, and the rigging was full of bright-coloured birds. I noticed one of them in particular, strongly marked, heavier-beaked. And every now and then it would spring upon one of the smaller, unsuspecting birds, and kill it. It was a shrike or butcher-bird; and it was steadily destroying all its fellows. Now I am a bird-lover, and I couldn't stand this. I only had a revolver handy, and it took me the whole day to get that butcher- bird. And while I was doing it, a thought flew across my mind, and never again left it. That butcher-bird on that German ship behaved exactly like Germany behaves.
Now, think for a moment of the butcher-bird's record. Bismarck's resort to forgery--to make sure of war in 1870--was thought clever in Germany, if a little original. Well, by hook and by crook--especially crook--the butcher-bird got three wars before. 1914, and each time the stakes and the butcher's bill mounted; they were higher in 1866 than in 1864, and higher in 1870 than in 1866. Each of these wars was carefully planned and provoked by the butcher-bird. Then, in 1905, it nearly got another war; but the French submitted to the humiliation of throwing overboard their Foreign Minister, Monsieur Delcasse, just as before Germany's Fifth War they recoiled again and again rather than give Germany any pretext for turning Europe into a blood-bath. There was another narrow squeak in 1911, but the butcher-bird landed its Fourth War right enough in 1914. This time the crescendo mounted formidably; stakes and butcher's bill went rocketing.
And what had Adolf Hitler to say about that? He says in Mein Kampf: "I sank down upon my knees and thanked heaven out of the fullness of my heart for the favour of being permitted to live in such a time." In his own exultation and sniffing of carnage, it never occurred to him in 1914 that four hundred million happinesses were to be lined up and knocked down. Hitler's mind, of course, is incapable of working on those lines. You may think it strange that anyone should thank heaven -- why heaven? -- for the chance of wholesale slaughter. But you will see from what I have just said that Hitler was one with the past. This was Der Tag--"The Day"--that had been toasted all over Germany; and those of us who had lived in Germany had long known it was being toasted and lived for. It is therefore not surprising that in 1939 Germany's Fifth War began. Hitler was so overjoyed at the Fourth War that he was determined to have a fifth all of his own, and he left no stone unturned to ensure and prepare for it.
A Nazi is congenitally incapable of peace. It is not his idea of life. There was never the least real chance of the Kaiser or Hitler not making war. A German War every fifteen years on an average. Butcher-birds are destructive animals. There was no drinking to, or preparation for, "The Day'' of 1914 in England or France, let alone in poor little Belgium. I have already said how far France went to avoid it; and England's "contemptibly small army''--as Germany described it--was not designed or ready for continental warfare. The characteristic of the butcher-bird is to pounce upon his neighbours when they are living peaceably beside him; and it is their characteristic never to suspect him till it is too late.
The butcher-bird had had, and won, three wars before any of his neighbours began to suspect what he was really after. It was world-domination. The first three wars were prelude and preparation. The Fourth War was a bid for the real thing. This lust of world-domination has been working in them for generations, and for two of them I have myself watched it at work. I have seen the idea of the German Empire corrupting German nature, as the German philosopher Nietzsche foresaw seventy years ago.
Well, it so happened that Germany's Fourth War failed, though it only just failed. From that moment the welkin rang with German grievances; and everyone was so anxious to forget the gratuitous destruction of the four hundred million happinesses, that they also forgot the cruelty with which Germany had conducted that war--indiscriminate sinkings, mass-deportations, cruelty in prison-camps--and the type of peace that she had imposed at Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest in the days when the aggressor seemed to be winning. And so everything must be blamed on the Treaty of Versailles; the whining bully must be picked up and dusted down, and put on his feet again. And soon the butcher-bird was back on his perch in the thornhedge, preparing for his next meal. This time it was destined to be a record one. And the strange thing was that his victims had contributed to put him there by all the means, including loans, in their charitable power. Of course they got nothing but abuse for that. I said just now that his fellow-birds always seem incapable of telling a butcher-bird when they see one; and it is uphill work pointing out its distinguishing marks, unmistakable though they are to any bird-lover.
Hitler has capitalized the German strain of ill-defined mysticism--a blind faith fed on phrases about Germany's mission, Germany's destiny, which thrives on blind obedience to blind doctrines.
Hitler said on the first day of this war that he would not wage it on women and children; yet that is exactly what he did from the start. But when did Hitler ever keep his word? Literally never once. And there is nothing new in Hitler. Frederick the Great was an adept in perfidy. And what, in 1914, did Bethmann-Hollweg call a solemn treaty with Prussia's signature on it? "A scrap of paper." He could have bitten his tongue out the moment he had said it, for in four words he had given the whole German show away. That is what most German leaders really think of treaties. There is a definite continuity in their outlook. Bismarck announced that he was satisfied after 1871; and Ribbentrop and Hitler kept saying they were satisfied with every fresh acquisition, especially after the annexation of the Sudetenland. Of course they didn't mean it, as everyone can now plainly see.
Nazi Germany has taught a tortured world that it is easier to go backwards towards barbarism than it is to go forward to a higher civilization; and that, if we were to fail in standing upto her, the clock would go back by a thousand years and for a thousand years.
Nazism is a fundamental fraud. It is a pluto-bureaucracy; every Nazi creates a job for his pal, and the vast corrupt gang enjoys a life very different from the hardships of the ordinary German. There is hardly a single professional Nazi with a clean pair of hands. The only equipment needed in Nazi politics is a pair of sewer-boots. What do the people get in return? Efficiency. Efficiency for what? For the destruction of Four Hundred Million Happinesses.
Yes, in very truth we are fighting against evil things--evils which have possessed the German people for weary generations.
At all costs the world must never again be dragged by Germany into a war--merely because it fails to understand how Germany has behaved in the past and how it will behave again in the future, unless the German people undergo a deep, spiritual regeneration. There can be a new Germany, but it must be a quite new Germany.
But you will build nothing so long as this Germany endures to destroy.
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